Bringing Hell

  *

  After the brief viewing of the newly-built infirmary (the essence of the rape still hanging ripe in the air) Hitler excuses himself from the dazzled officer corps on the excuse of the weather and a cup of coffee. In reality it is neither.

  Inside the commandant’s quarters he mills around, commenting briefly on news from France, the continued siege of London, the damnable Russians in the East. Krause all the while fluttering about him like an irksome fly in need of swatting, the others nothing but shuffle-stepped ghosts. He excuses himself to the toilet, locks the door and listens intently to make sure no one is waiting in the hallway on his return. These moments of privacy are becoming less and less frequent and that is a problem. He unbuttons the coat, shakes it free of his shoulders and hangs it from the nail on the wall. Such savage appointments, he thinks acidly. Such primitives. Of course he has no need for any toilet, untold millennia have brought him far past such foul necessity.

  He smiles into the small, cracked mirror hanging lopsided over the stained sink, thinks, someone will pay for that. And for one brief instant the alien shines clear in its reflective depths, a thing of little original substance, just winking tendrils of helium, argon, radon, other inert gasses bound up in a bald, unquenchable prism of hate. It originated in the cold, gravity-starved spaces beyond the known constellations, a place of sentient gasses having no predilection for physical form, but possessing mechanisms with which to achieve such mutations. If and when such time arose.

  A time like now.

  The dreams remind it of past triumphs, its rich history of plunder. The spoils of a million hospitable planets, these great heaving, living masses of organic matter which it occasionally happens upon in its path through the empty immensities of space. As its species has done for eons.

  Its face splits wide for a moment (the air alive with the crackling and humming of electricity), and then gradually coalesces again into the slight Austrian’s form. The smile remains though, human. Earthly. It nods. Though many have no thought or term for the purpose it steadfastly pursues, at times a race of Sentients will. Like this world with its laughable philosophy.

  It wishes the hounds were here, those beautiful, unmerciful shepherds slavering over themselves to abide its every wish. From love. Nothing else. What a righteous tool. It will miss the creatures when their pitiful lives are done, but it will long remember their minds, those fine instruments of absolute willingness that the brute officers waiting outside can only touch. The hounds do its biding without qualm, without question. Without question. It is not a common characteristic among the many worlds, but it does help to define a simple facet of the strange religion it finds here, without all the trappings of dogma.

  Simple, complete subservience. The alien likes that, will remember it in the vast ages to come.

  And now, standing before the mirror, it reflects on what it has come to know, this enigma of control. How this thing called religion can be manipulated and plied, opened at the seams to serve whatever private purpose is deemed necessary. It is most assuredly uncommon, never before has this Form experienced nor even now fully come to understand such implications. But the alien is a quick study. It already knows these religions had many prophets, firebrands, messiahs and devils, an overwhelming pantheon each replete with its own heaven and hell. Of the former it knows nothing, but of the latter it is well-versed: the pit, the flames, the desolate damnation.

  It turns on the water and shoves its hands underneath, wanting them to gleam wetly in the light when it leaves the room. Ach ja, it thinks in the tongue it is beginning to get used to. Hitler’s mouth draws into a grimace even as the eyes remain graveyard dead.

  It will bring Hell all right.

  It will bring Hell the likes of which this world has never known nor believed possible…